SEXUALITY IN MARRIAGE: FREQUENCY
The increase in reported sexual activity over the past decade or so is reflected in the data on marital intercourse. Hunt makes the interesting observation that the smaller increase for females may mean that women are perceiving the frequency of their sexual intercourse more accurately today. If frequency of intercourse were tied more to the male’s desire than to the female’s, so that she had to meet his needs rather than her own, she might tend to overestimate the incidence of such events. By contrast, if we assume that wives today have more control over the frequency of intercourse, then their estimates should be closer to reality. If this hypothesis is valid, then the smaller increase in females’ reported frequency is related to subjective factors.
Though not directly comparable to the data from the Hunt study, the median frequency is calculated at 8.5 times per month, or about twice a week. This is nearly identical with the medians which Hunt obtained for the twenty-five to thirty-four and thirty-five to forty-four age groups. Since three out of four women in the Redbook sample were under thirty-five, the frequencies for the two groups appear to be very similar.
Obviously median frequencies are only one kind of indication of how often married people have intercourse. Individual variation, as one would expect, was considerable in all the studies. For example, even in Kinsey’s younger groups, a few individuals had marital coitus less often than once in two weeks, while in every age group, from the youngest to age forty, some persons were having marital coitus on an average of four times a day, seven days a week (Kinsey and others).
Neither Kinsey nor Hunt found a relationship between frequency of coitus in marriage and either education or occupational status. Religion, however, was related to frequency in both studies. Kinsey and others reported that less religious husbands had intercourse 20% to 30% more often than did religious mates; such an effect was not found for women, however, leading Kinsey and others to remark that the wife’s coital rate was more likely to be tied to her husband’s desires than to her level of devotion. Hunt found the opposite effect: churchgoing females reported a lower frequency of marital coitus than did churchgoing males or non-churchgoing males and females. Hunt thought that this, too, might reflect the greater influence that wives now have over marital sexual activity. The frequency of sex for married women now might reflect more closely their own wishes than their husbands’ desires.
Although intercourse with the spouse is the chief sexual outlet for married people, it falls far short of being their only outlet. Kinsey and others found an interesting relationship between social level and percent of the total outlet which the married male derived from intercourse with his spouse. For the lower group, marital intercourse accounted for 80% of the outlet during the early years of marriage, increasing to 90% by age fifty. College-educated males on the other hand derived 85% of their total outlet from their wives during the early years, but only 62% by age fifty-five. Kinsey thought that one explanation for this dramatic decline was an increasing dissatisfaction “with the relations which are had with restrained upper level wives”.
Wives, likewise, derived only part of their sexual outlet from marital coitus. The maximum part of the sexual outlet derived from marital intercourse was 89%, reached between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five, after which the percentage steadily dropped. By age sixty, only 72% of the total outlet of the married women was derived from marital coitus (Kinsey and others).
A recent study (Edwards and Booth) provides evidence that marital intercourse tends to be discontinuous for a sizeable segment of the population. Their stratified probability sample consisted of 144 men and 221 women who had been married between one and twenty years. As part of a two-hour interview, subjects were asked whether intercourse had ever stopped for any reason other than pregnancy, and if so, why and for how long. One-third of the respondents indicated that they had experienced such a cessation, the median length of which was eight weeks. Significant differences emerged between the men and women reporting such cessation: for the men, social background factors such as recent emigration from Europe, being non-Catholic, and lack of employment for the wife were important; for the women, avoidance of intercourse was related to factors in the marriage: perception of the husband as dominant, as not affectionate, or as threatening to leave home. The only common factor for the two sexes was perception of a lack of privacy. Self-reported causes, however, were the same for both men and women: surgery, illness, marital discord, and type of birth control used were some of them. The incidence of discontinuity in marital sex for this sample suggests that the phenomenon is by no means uncommon and enhances, as the authors point out, the sense of intercourse as a symbolic communication between spouses who are otherwise distant from each other’s true feelings.
*75/187/5*
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